Thought and Reality in Hegel's System

Thought and Reality in Hegel’s System/19say, does not become real knowledge of it. In such a relation knowledgeis determined as finite, and as of the finite; in its object there remainssomething essentially inner, whose notion is thus unattainable by andforeign to knowledge, which finds here its limit and its end, and is onthat account limited and finite.” So far we have a statement of the critic’sview with its attendant difficulties. By way of criticism and expositionof his own position, Hegel continues: “But to take such a relation as theonly one, or as final or absolute, is a purely made-up and unjustifiableassumption of the Understanding. Real knowledge, inasmuch as it doesnot remain outside the object, but in point of fact occupies itself with it,must be immanent in the object, the proper movement of its nature, onlyexpressed in the form of thought and taken up into consciousness.” 36This passage is self-explanatory, and comment on it seems superfluous.In it Hegel has simply pointed out the inevitable dualism involved in theposition which Mr. McTaggart has attributed to him; and in oppositionto such a position he has stated his own more objective standpointAn objection which arises just here seems prima facie unanswerable.If it be true that thought actually does exhaust reality, then it mustbe that thought, or knowing experience, and reality coincide. But cansuch a view possibly be seriously entertained? Is it not nonsense to saythat thought is co-extensive with the real, when so much of our everydayexperience, our hopes, our fears, our loves, our hates, fall outsidethe thinking process? Can one be so mad as to attempt to reduce existentialreality to terms of ideas? Lotze has put the objection very forciblythus: “Nothing is simpler than to convince ourselves that every apprehendingintelligence can only see things as they look to it when it perceivesthem, not as they look when no one perceives them; he who demandsa knowledge which should be more than a perfectly connectedand consistent system of ideas about the thing, a knowledge which shouldactually exhaust the thing itself, is no longer asking for knowledge atall, but for something entirely unintelligible.” 37 Mr. Bradley, in a classicpassage, has voiced the same feeling: “Unless thought stands for somethingthat falls beyond mere intelligence, if ‘thinking’ is not used withsome strange implication that never was part of the meaning of the word,a lingering scruple still forbids us to believe that reality can ever bepurely rational.... The notion that existence could be the same as understandingstrikes as cold and ghost-like as the dreariest materialism. Thatthe glory of this world in the end is appearance leaves the world moreglorious, if we feel it is a show of some fuller splendour; but the sensu-